When Guotai Junan Securities completed its merger with Haitong Securities in late 2024, creating a combined entity with more than $226 billion in assets, many observers assumed China’s brokerage consolidation wave had reached its headline peak. They were wrong. When CICC announced in November 2025 that it would absorb Dongxing Securities and Cinda Securities in a share-swap deal — creating a fourth entity with over $140 billion in assets — that assumption was revised again. And now, with Orient Securities emerging as the latest major player in a deal that Bloomberg reports could create a combined brokerage worth approximately $86 billion, it is clear that Beijing’s campaign to reshape China’s sprawling securities industry into a small number of globally competitive giants is nowhere near finished.
The Orient Securities deal is another chapter in one of the most consequential financial restructuring programmes in the world today — one that is being driven not by market forces alone, but by an explicit state directive from Xi Jinping’s government to build Chinese investment banks capable of competing with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan on the global stage.
What Orient Securities Brings to the Table
Orient Securities, known by its Chinese ticker abbreviation DFZQ, is a Shanghai-based integrated securities firm founded in 1998 and listed on both the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It is a constituent of the SSE 50 Index, the blue-chip benchmark of China’s largest listed companies. In terms of business profile, it is a broad-based operator — roughly 74% of its revenue comes from securities brokerage and trading services, about 17% from private banking and asset management, and the remainder from investment banking and other activities.
The firm manages 177 branches across 87 Chinese cities and employs more than 7,000 people. Its total assets stand at approximately 326.6 billion yuan — the equivalent of roughly $45 billion before the deal — making it a significant mid-tier player in an industry that, until recently, consisted of more than 140 domestic and foreign firms competing in a market the China Securities Regulatory Commission has explicitly identified as too fragmented.
The $86 billion combined entity that Orient Securities’s deal would create positions the firm meaningfully above its current weight class, moving it into the tier of institutions that can compete meaningfully for the largest domestic institutional mandates, cross-border underwriting deals, and the kind of asset management mandates that China’s rapidly expanding wealth management sector is generating.
The Policy Engine Behind the Deals
To understand why this deal is happening now, it helps to understand the regulatory framework that has made it all but inevitable. In March 2024, China’s securities regulator, the CSRC, set a formal target: develop approximately ten leading securities institutions by 2029, with two to three internationally competitive investment banks in place by 2035. The State Council followed with a nine-point guideline document on capital market reform that explicitly called for a restructuring of the securities industry to boost competitiveness.
This was not a suggestion. It was a directive, backed by the weight of Beijing’s economic policy apparatus, and it has been implemented through precisely the kind of state-coordinated share-swap mergers that characterise China’s approach to strategic industry restructuring. The brokerages involved are almost uniformly state-controlled — either directly by government entities or through Central Huijin Investment, the sovereign wealth fund subsidiary that sits at the centre of China’s state financial ownership structure. When Central Huijin controls or co-controls most of the parties to a proposed merger, the usual obstacles to deal completion — shareholder resistance, competing interests, valuation disputes — tend to be managed rather than litigated.
The consolidation in China’s 12 trillion yuan brokerage industry is part of a broader strategic logic that goes beyond domestic market efficiency. It is also a response to what the South China Morning Post’s coverage of earlier deals described as “an all-out confrontation with the US that threatens financial decoupling.” As global banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley obtained full ownership of their China-based securities subsidiaries in recent years — expanding their presence in China’s capital markets — Beijing recognised that without scale, Chinese brokerages would be structurally disadvantaged in competing for the most lucrative institutional and cross-border business. The consolidation wave is, in part, an answer to that challenge.
“The restructuring is conducive to building a first-class investment bank and supporting the reform of the financial market and the high-quality development of the securities industry,” CICC said in its November 2025 merger statement — language that could apply equally to every deal in this wave, including the Orient Securities transaction.
A 12-Trillion-Yuan Industry Being Rebuilt From the Top Down
The speed and ambition of China’s brokerage consolidation is worth placing in global context. In 2024 alone, China’s securities regulator oversaw merger announcements between six pairs of brokerages. The Guotai Junan-Haitong combination created an entity with assets of approximately 1.68 trillion yuan. The CICC-Dongxing-Cinda combination would produce assets approaching 1 trillion yuan. The Orient Securities deal adds another substantial node to a network of scaled-up institutions designed to be both domestically dominant and internationally credible.
What makes the Chinese model distinctive is not just the scale of the consolidation, but the mechanism. These are not hostile takeovers or auction-driven mergers. They are share-swaps engineered among state-connected entities, with regulatory approval essentially pre-structured into the process. The smaller firm typically exchanges shares for stock in the acquirer or combined entity, exits its own listing status on the stock exchange, and its institutional knowledge and client relationships are folded into a larger platform. For employees and clients, the transition is gradual; for the industry’s competitive structure, it is transformative.
Analysts have noted that each major deal in this wave generates speculation about the next one. When Guotai Junan merged with Haitong, commentators flagged potential combinations involving CICC and Galaxy Securities. When CICC announced its absorption of Dongxing and Cinda, attention turned to the remaining mid-tier firms — including Orient Securities — as candidates for the next round. “More consolidation could be on the way,” said Sun Tin, an analyst at Soochow Securities, after the CICC deal was announced. Eventually she was right.
The Competitive Stakes
The firms being built through this consolidation wave are designed to occupy a specific role in China’s financial system as they are the institutions that Beijing wants to underwrite China’s largest domestic IPOs, manage the country’s growing sovereign and institutional wealth, and — eventually — compete for mandates in international capital markets that currently flow almost exclusively to US and European investment banks.
Soochow Securities analyst Sun Tin described the strategic logic with characteristic efficiency: “Through mergers and acquisitions, big players can overcome their shortcomings and solidify advantages, while smaller ones can scale up their businesses.” The Orient Securities deal fits that framework: a firm with genuine strengths in wealth management and asset management, combined with whatever complementary capabilities its merger partner brings, produces an entity with a broader service footprint and greater capital depth than either could achieve alone.
The ultimate benchmark for this programme is not the domestic ranking tables, however. It is whether any Chinese brokerage can, within the decade, genuinely compete with the likes of Goldman Sachs for a global cross-border deal. That target remains distant. But the gap is, with each successive merger, measurably smaller.
Written by Shalin Soni, CMA specializing in financial analysis, global markets, and corporate strategy, with hands-on experience in financial planning and analytical decision-making.
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Source: Based on Bloomberg and publicly available information.